The present invention relates to a display unit for an agricultural working vehicle, and to an agricultural working vehicle, in particular a combine harvester in which a display unit of this type is used.
Agricultural working vehicles, e.g., tractors, combine harvesters, forage harvesters, etc., typically include a large number of working units, the setting parameters of which may be influenced by an automatic control or via an input made in an operating element by an operator. In modern agricultural working machines, the functionality and/or working result of individual working units or a plurality of interacting working units depends substantially on making a correct determination regarding the setting parameters of the individual working units. Complex interactions take place between the individual units, and they affect the working result. The correlation between setting parameters of the units and the working result is complicated and often non-linear, and so it is difficult for automatic control and for a trained operator to estimate in a specific case how a change that was made to one or more setting parameters of the working machine will affect the working result.
Compounding this difficulty is the fact that, in many cases, the change made to the setting parameter affects the working result only after a considerable time delay which may not be the same under all conditions. Although computer-assisted models of the working sequences in the working machine may help an operator to estimate the effect of a change to an setting parameter in advance, a model of this type is unable to deliver an exact prognosis until all relevant basic conditions are known with sufficient accuracy.
If this is not the case, the model-assisted prognosis may even be counterproductive, since, when the operator of the machine sees the results of the prognosis in the display, this may prevent the operator from changing a parameter, even though, in reality, doing so would be entirely suitable in order to improve the working result.
Regardless of whether an operator determines the setting parameter, or whether an automatic control system does this based on a computer-assisted model, the operator must check to determine whether the selected setting parameter values lead to a satisfactory working result. To make it possible for the operator to do this, operating parameters that are representative of the quality of the working result must be shown to him in a manner that is transparent and reduced to the essential information.